Like this:

You’d be right to think that the date up there is not today’s date. But I don’t have a better way of defining what I’ll be sharing with you at the moment. Since I got home, I’ve been writing about 2000 words a day on my Miska project. What follows is part of what I wrote on, you guessed it, the 7th. It is first draft material, which means that I haven’t done more than look at it and think that it needs editing. Enjoy!

Like this:

Part of my homework for this week was to write a “two page” character intro for an engaging Middle Grade character. I dislike “pages” as a measure of length when I’m writing, since I don’t use Word and see no reason to change that, but that translates to roughly 500 words. Of course, I wrote one and wasn’t satisfied, so now I have two that I’m not totally satisfied with. I feel like they do a better job of introducing conflict and drama than they do of introducing a particular character, if only because I have little tolerance for writing an opening scene that doesn’t start something.

In any case, here’s two Middle Grade scenes presented back-to-back, with no real relation between the two. Oh, yes, and one of them is actually about Jerome from my Elven Progenitors setting. Enjoy!

Miska is a character who’s shown up in several of my drafts of various stories in the Elven Progenitors universe for a while now. She started off as a secondary character in the backstory of another secondary character, but quickly took on a life of her own in my imagination. I always wanted to find out how she’d come to be where she was, and I tried, again and again, to write it. But every time I tried, I lost interest within a few pages. I was just dead *bored* with what I was writing, which I took to be a bad sign. I tried, and tried, and eventually I gave up and put the story on the backburner, but yesterday I had an epiphany and started writing down notes like mad. My first scene based on those notes follows. It turns out, I wasn’t going back far enough; I needed to see how it was that Miska, the Pirate Queen, went to sea in the first place…

Welp, this one took me a long time to finish. I’m still not quite sure how that happened. Part of it was that I started the book while I had far too many things on my plate and thus got distracted. But part of it was that at a certain point in The Wizard’s Dilemma, I felt like I could see where all of the pieces were, where they needed to go, and had a pretty good idea of how they were going to get there… and I really wanted them to just be there already, instead of making me wait. I suspect that this is the price I pay for reading so much. Or perhaps for being impatient.

It turns out that I was right about most of those various story beats, but seeing what Diane Duane did with them was far more satisfying than what I’d imagined. I probably should have seen that coming, given that I’ve read the earlier books in the series and know how good Duane is at her work. Once I finally got over my block and moved into the last parts of the book, I didn’t want to put it down. And then, of course, the climax made me cry. Whatever the real reasons for my reading delays, I feel quite certain in saying that this was an excellent book, one worth reading, worth recommending, and one that leaves me wanting to read the next one in the series. Just like the previous books in the series. I probably could have seen that coming too.